In addition, China Unicom and China Telecom are reportedly considering leasing TD-LTE capacity from China Mobile. This would save the operators money on infrastructure as well as supporting the Chinese-developed LTE strain.

While FDD-LTE has been used in more global deployments, TD-LTE has the backing of China Mobile as well as numerous other major operators. These include Japan’s SoftBank and India’s Bharti Airtel. This marks a departure from the Chinese-developed 3G strain, TD-SCDMA, which did not catch on internationally.

The allocation of spectrum appears to have benefitted China Unicom more than China Telecom, as the 1.8GHz band is already widely used for FDD-LTE, meaning that infrastructure and terminals are already in place.